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> Both would be horrified by this.

Really? I don't know Ursula Le Guin except through Lathe of Heaven and Left Hand of Darkness (I loved the former, not the latter). She was a science fiction author who liked Taoism; why do you think she'd object?

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Well, I think it rude to put them in a spot like this, it's not very gentlemanly, but then…

Left Hand of Darkness was the first I read when I was about 15, some forty years ago, I'd mostly read hard SF before then, …and then discovered Delaney and the Brit new wave (which was not yet ten years old and in Tasmania that meant it was only 18 months old), but The Dispossessed had a bigger influence. Reading Iris Murdoch novels had no influence at all but that was a decade later.

Iris Murdoch has claimed Buddhist influence but only seems to use these methods to disrespect structuralists, and includes Derrida's Deconstructionists in this, but I see more in common between later Wittgenstein, Deconstruction, and some Buddhist thought than any of them and (what I guess I think of as) hard structuralism (hegelianism, platonism marxist, freudian) where some hard gnosis is used to animistically explain X, though of course the relational structuralism of linguistics like Saussure makes this a bit grey. Chomsky/Pinker undo that greyness and make it hard again of course. I find mixing criticism of hard structuralism (Marxist leninism) and deconstruction ( as chaos surfing)(trolling??) a bit strange. But then, Putin uses KGB methods of chaos surfing to build a personal dictatorship of a functional narcissist with shallow affect, so maybe Iris' work is a good premonition.

Merrell, Floyd. Deconstruction Reframed. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2000.

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